Talking Points: Notable quotes from the week in news

Collector Don Hobbs poses with his 11,000 volumes of Sherlock Holmes books, which are primarily foreign language editions on Thursday, Dec. 13, 2012 at his home in Flower Mound, Texas.

Published: 10 January 2013 03:16 PM

Updated: 10 January 2013 03:16 PM

“We shouldn’t be sitting here slapping ourselves on the back for a great job. All it did was address the fiscal cliff problem and set us up for a debt ceiling debacle.” — Honeywell International CEO David Cote, on Congress’ last-minute fiscal cliff deal (The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday)

“This is war. Congress is going to learn that the tea party has not lost its bite.” — Todd Cefaratti, founder of TheTeaParty.Net, in a news release criticizing the fiscal cliff deal and vowing to wage primary battles against Republicans who supported the legislation (TheTeaParty.Net, Wednesday)

“Whatever hope [Mr. Obama] may have had of changing the tone in Washington must have disappeared by now. It’s an unpleasant discovery that the election appears to have changed much less and settled much less than he at least hoped.” — William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton (The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday)

“There are still people who will not watch it, who will say that it’s a ‘terrorist network.’” — Philip Seib, author of “The Al Jazeera Effect,” on former Vice President Al Gore’s sale of cable channel Current TV to Al-Jazeera (The New York Times, Tuesday)

“President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day.” — ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, on the president signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 despite his own threat to veto it over prohibitions on closing the Guantánamo Bay prison camp (Huffington Post, Thursday)

“Take a picture, this date, and see if we’re playing the same picture next year. We always think it’s going to get better, but it’s the same-old same-old.” — Former Cowboy Deion Sanders, commenting on the Dallas Cowboys missing the playoffs (Los Angeles Times, Monday)

“Over 2 million people use the park every year, so it’s one of the most highly used parks in Dallas. We want to make sure that we not only improve it but maintain … the ecosystem that has been created in the past 100 years.” — Rachel Wright of White Rock Lake Conservancy, on a volunteer effort to plant 200 trees this month on the east side of White Rock Lake (The Dallas Morning News, Thursday)

“If I have to start suspending guys for not doing things they’re supposed to be doing on the court, I’ll do it. And Mark and I will get into it about that. But somehow, things have got to change, and it can’t just be about that it’s a tough schedule. It just can’t.” — Frustrated Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle on the team’s longest losing streak in several years (The Dallas Morning News, Monday)

“Our family members will never be on this earth with us again, and a movie ticket and some token words from people who didn’t care enough to reach out to us, nor respond when we reached out to them to talk, is appalling.” — Relatives of victims of the July mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., theater, in a letter rejecting an invitation from Plano-based Cinemark to attend the theater’s reopening (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Wednesday)

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